Marc Francis '11 Publishes 'Curating Deviance' with Duke University Press

MA Film and Media Studies alum Marc Francis '11 will publish his new film history Curating Deviance: Programming the Queer Canon with Duke University Press in February 2026. In the book, Francis traces US art house cinemas' savvy programmers as they screened films and platformed queer visionaries like John Waters, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Russ Meyer, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder between 1968 and 1989.

"Curating Deviance attempts to recenter queer cinema in the history of art house exhibition by studying its programming and curation. Monthly calendars for urban art houses testify to the fact that queer films were far from marginal at this time; in fact, they were so prevalent that they wielded a gravitational pull that altered theaters’ entire curatorial frameworks," Francis writes in the introduction of the book.

Curating Deviance is published in the Camera Obscura book series from Duke University Press, which emerged from the university's literary journal of the same name, and has been the leading journal of feminist film theory since 1976.

"In Marc Francis’s well-researched and robustly imagined Curating Deviance, art-house revival has found both a cultural history and curatorial rationale that goes beyond nostalgia," said Tavia Nyong'o, the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University. "With a theorist’s acuity and a cinephile’s affection, Francis reframes stories of imaginative curators and programmers who transformed the movie calendar into a renegade syllabus of maverick desire."

Francis drew from interviews with art house cinema and conservatory programmers Fabiano Canosa, Edith Kramer, [Professor Emeritus of Professional Practice in Film and Media Studies] Richard Peña, Marcus Hu, Kim Jorgensen, Jane Giles, and Stephen Soba to constellate the deviant and queer programming that created cultural touchstones out of theatres in cities across the country.

"Witty, theoretically astute, and rigorously researched, Curating Deviance opens new theories of intertextual signification through close reading of ‘promiscuous programming’ in late-twentieth-century repertory and art houses," said Georgetown film professor Caetlin Benson-Allott. "Francis’s prose is accessible enough for undergraduates, and his arguments will satisfy and surprise seasoned exhibition and queer cinema historians alike."

Marc Francis is a film scholar who works at Yale University as the Film Programming Manager for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fischer holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He served as Head Programmer for Wayward Cinema (Los Angeles), and worked in film archiving, preservation, and servicing at Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers Discovery, and HBO. He was the Associate Editor of Film Quarterly, where he served on the editorial staff for over eight years.